The US IPO market has gone cold

The number of US companies going public has really dropped off lately.

"After a record year in 2014, the IPO market slowed dramatically in the first quarter of 2015," Renaissance Capital analysts said.

The first quarter of 2015, which ended Tuesday, was the slowest quarter for IPOs since the first quarter of 2013. While stock prices have been near all-time highs, market volatility has been escalating, turning companies off from trying to unload shares onto the public markets.

Renaissance Capital published an analysis of IPO data from the first quarter of 2015, and found that compared to last year (when there were 64 IPOs in the first quarter of the year), these market debuts fell by more than 46%. Equally disconcerting for the banking community, the value of those offerings also fell correspondingly, from $10.6 billion in 2014 to just $5.4 billion for the first quarter of 2015:

The IPO scene hasn't been too hot to start 2015, after a big year for initial public offerings in 2014. Renaissance Capital

By category, nearly every kind of IPO fell in number, with the notable exception of healthcare offerings. The number of financial services offerings rose from the first quarter of 2014 (5) to the first quarter of this year (9). However, the overall value of the financial services IPOs fell, by more than 50 percent.

Other bad news from the Renaissance report centers on healthcare and biotechnology IPOs: just in the first quarter of this year, eight of the 10 worst-performing offerings were from the healthcare space.

Also, private equity offerings did little to prop up the IPO pipeline; Renaissance counted just 5 IPOs from private, the least active quarter for LBO shops since 2009.

Private equity firms' IPO exits were fewer in number than any time dating back to 2009 Renaissance Capital